Woe
to me, and my never ending obsession with high end hardcovers. Had
this been solicited as a softcover or an Essential (as was
discussed over on the Masterworks Message Board years ago), I would
have griped “Why not in hardcover??” I got my wish, for
better or for worse. I bought several of these steaming piles of crap
off of the stands in the summer of 1989, and didn't realize until
after I bought this 544 page book that this crossover was one
of the main reasons that I dropped comic books in late '89/early '90.
I disliked the shyster “gotta buy 'em all for the complete story”
crossover gimmicks which started several years prior with Secret
Wars II. I disliked the then new breed of comic book “artists”
like Rob Liefeld, and even the writing by veterans like Roy Thomas
and Gerry Conway was overwritten and uninspired.

...so don't even try!

This
book has it's share of solid entertainment value, but much of it is
overwritten and clunky. I love old comic books, but there are aspects
to them that I find annoying, such as when someone is about to get
hit with a beam or something, and the antagonist telegraphs it in
their dialogue. “I shall hit you with this laser beam, which
will...” or other such nonsense.

Artwork by Mark Bagley.

The
artwork by Rob Liefeld can never be badmouthed enough as far as I am
concerned, and it was he who inspired me to quit buying comic books
in the final months of 1989. If this was what was going on now, then
I wanted nothing to do with it. I couldn't have fathomed how much
worse things would get with the ensuing Image boom. Thankfully, I sat
all of that holo-foil variant nonsense out.

"Artwork" by Rob Liefeld. No, Liefeld is not an abstract artist, merely incompetent.

The
gist- Ghaur, high priest of the Deviants, conspires with Llyra of
Lemuria to use Attuma and the Atlanteans as a catspaw in an attempt
to bring about the return of Set, the Serpent God. Attuma and his
Atlantean army are tricked into attacking the surface world, with
Ghaur knowing full well that the armies of Atlantis will slaughter
innocent civilians, fail against the surface world's superheroes, and
will result in a blood sacrifice to bring Set back to this dimension.
When Attuma withdraws his armies, Ghaur goes with his plan B:
kidnapping seven super-heroines to offer to Set as brides. (Set has
seven heads.)

Artwork by John Byrne. Note how there is NO gutter loss in this double page spread. DC should take notes. It CAN be done.

The
best part of this book are each Annual's back-up stories, the 14
chapter The Saga of the Serpent Crown by Marvel historian
Peter Sanderson and then newbie artist Mark Bagley. They go so far
and so deep into continuity that it'll make your head spin. I love
continuity, but there is a point where those hippies writing comics
in the '60s and '70s made things ridiculously complicated. I am
looking at you, Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart. Still, our host Uatu
the Watcher clearly explains things, and by the end of those
back-ups, you feel like you have a solid grasp on the subject. They
are all collected in the back of the book, so that they can be read
in exact order rather than in their proper printed location at the
back of each annual. It didn't make my OCD twitch, but your mileage
may vary.

Artwork by Mark Bagley.

The
original series editors were terrible, with countless typos and word
balloons attributed to the wrong character on numerous occasions.
While typos can be somewhat forgiven when you think back to the
pre-spell check era, the errors that I caught were glaringly obvious.
Now, here is a chance for the collected edition obsessives to get
their own o-fish-al Junk Food For Thought no-prize. They used
to do paste-ups over the word balloons on the original art with
spelling corrections which often fell off or became lost. I no longer
own the floppies of these issues, so if someone wants to go issue by
issue, page by page, and determine if they were indeed corrected for
print and we have superior, pre-correction file sources here, shoot
me an email. Snap a picture (or scan) of them side by side, and I
will post your name and picture in this blog. Wow! Fame and fortune
can be yours too.

Junk
Food For Thought rating: 2.5 out of 5.

Note how terrible the re-coloring is on this Rob Liefeld "artwork".

The
OCD zone- The restoration is generally excellent, with two
exceptions: Pages 512-517, the back-up story from Web
of Spider-ManAnnualNo. 5, where the linework is dropped out in several spots,
and the re-coloring on New
Mutants AnnualNo.
5, which has shoddy re-coloring, looking “airbrushed” due to the
computer filling in the shapes rather than doing it “by hand” on
the computer. The latter isn't that big of a deal, however, as it has
art by Rob Liefeld. Even Cory Sedlmeier and Michael Kelleher couldn't
make his art look good.

Linework
restoration: 4 out of 5.

Color
restoration: 4 out of 5.

Overall
rating affected by the problems listed above. Restoration rating
would have been closer to 5
without these defects.Paper rating: 4.5 out of 5.Binding rating: 5 out of 5. Lays perfectly flat at any and every point of the book.

2 comments:

Thanks. I could have put the money I spent on this omnibus in my daughters college fund. But, no, I get to look at this book in "anticipation" on my shelf over the years because you know I really want to dive right into this right away.